India, Women buying food for cows, 1993 courtesy of the estate of norma holt
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and friendship deepened and grew beyond either of last one on a dance floor, even if it meant, later in their expectations. Thanks to the careful digitization life, standing with the help of her cane or walker and by Rabon of contact sheets, slides, Kodachrome, shimmying her shoulders. She loved the impromptu 35 mm, and medium format photographs, the abil- gathering of friends and food and traveled to Provity for anyone, including Holt herself, to view the incetown from New York, just six weeks before she thousands of photographs she produced over her died at ninety-four, to attend the fiftieth birthday lifetime was finally possible. Now that one can see party of musician Roxanne Layton. the Israeli photographs—along with those Holt took It was both of these aspects of her character in New York, the American Southwest, and around that gave her not only unparalleled access into the the world, including Jamaica, India, Guatemala, lives and cultures of people in countries around the Morocco, Egypt, West Africa, Mexico, Italy, Japan, world, but also the courage to ask anyone—friend, Ireland, Greece, and Nepal—one is disabused of neighbor, or acquaintance—to please take her into the familiar notion of Holt as a photographer of the bay in Provincetown for a dunk when, in her only women and children. While she was intensely last decade, she could no longer swim, but needed passionate about, and an advocate for, the struggles someone to hold her steady while she took one of women and children, especially older women and quick plunge into the salty, refreshing sea. those in developing nations, what is abundantly apparent in her work is a curiosity about, and desire PAMELA MANDELL has work forthcoming in the Los to capture, humanity: the simple, complicated, cou- Angeles Review, and her articles have appeared in artrageous stubborn existence of people everywhere. scope, Art New England, and elsewhere; she wrote Traveling as an older woman was challenging for the artists’ biographies for Norma Holt’s On Equal Holt, as she told Thompson in the Art Paper inter- Ground. She is the recipient of grants from the Verview, “It may be even more exhausting than photo- mont Arts Council, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, graphing children, going to these countries where and the Provincetown Cultural Council, as well as fellowthe heat is excessive, and the food is strange and ships to the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in southern everything is different . . . but I refuse to give in to it. Vermont with her husband, Paul Bowen. I just do it at a slower pace.” One of Holt’s distinguishing characteristics, familiar to those who knew her well (and even those who didn’t), was her ability to coerce, enchant, plead, and seduce people to fund her projects, drive her into the African bush or the Negev Desert, fly her into a field on a Himalayan mountainside, act as her translator in Burkina Faso, or become her bodyguard in Egypt. Holt was also a supremely social creature and never missed any opportunity to enjoy an opera, concert, reading, they also faced the sea photo by ewa nogiec play, or party. She always was the